Grim's Hall

Apocalypse porn.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on a new wave of disaster movies.

"A flood of postapocalyptic stories is now headed toward movie theaters and TV screens: Expect to see characters fending off cannibals, picking up day-to-day survival techniques and struggling to maintain their humanity amid the ruins. Previous waves of pop-culture disaster, from the Atomic Age paranoia of “War of the Worlds” to Watergate-era flicks such as “The Towering Inferno,” have depicted calamity in stunning detail. Many of the new projects, however, actually skip the spectacle of doomsday. Instead, they’re more fixed on what goes down in the aftermath."

This sort of stuff generally annoys me, since it is typically the product of some depressed writer, now trying infect the rest of us with their wretchedness:

“For me, I feel like I live in an apocalyptic world with global warfare, a recession, and resource scarcity,” says Jesse Alexander, writer and executive producer of NBC’s “Day One.”

Manup, Jesse. It's not that bad. The government isn't drafting your spoiled, whitebread, middle class butt and making you storm Iwo Jima.
But I also see this sort of thinking from time to time on plenty of blogs, (and comments on blogs), by people who really ought to know better. Whether it's black helicopters, Jihadi Nukes, H1N1, or ACORN activists, there are too many people out there who think that the end of the world is nigh. The end of the world has been predicted before. It did not end then, and it isn't going to end now.